Judge demands evidence Trump administration is halting layoffs during shutdown
Judge demands evidence Trump administration is halting layoffs during shutdown
A federal judge moved up a deadline for the Trump administration to show how they are complying with her order halting layoffs during the government shutdown, as legal battles over the administration’s reductions in force enter a new phase while the congressional fight over government funding remains stalled.
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, blocked the Trump administration from going forward with layoffs of government workers during the shutdown on Wednesday, but later moved up a deadline for the administration to detail its reduction-in-force plans and how administration officials are complying with her order to halt those RIFs.
The deadline for the administration to prove compliance with the Wednesday order was set for 8 p.m. Friday but was moved up six hours to 2 p.m. EDT, with a 6 p.m. EDT status conference scheduled. The schedule change came after government unions, citing “multiple credible sources,” expressed concerns in a filing Thursday that the administration was still planning to go forward with layoffs next week at the Department of the Interior.
Illston, in her Wednesday order, described the Trump administration’s use of a government shutdown to permanently cut the federal workforce as unusual, arguing that if the unions’ allegations about the layoffs are true, the administration’s actions are the “epitome of hasty, arbitrary and capricious decisionmaking.”
“It is also far from normal for an administration to fire line-level civilian employees during a
government shutdown as a way to punish the opposing political party. But this is precisely what
President Trump has announced he is doing,” Illston said in her order.
The pause of mass layoffs during the government is the latest twist in a legal saga over Trump administration federal workforce cuts, which have spanned the entire time the president has been back in the White House.
The Supreme Court has already stepped in multiple times to overrule lower court judges who have tried to stop Trump’s federal workforce cuts.
The president’s mass layoff plan for the federal government was blocked earlier this year by a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, but the Supreme Court lifted that order via its emergency docket in July.
Weeks after the Supreme Court allowed that mass layoff plan to proceed, the high court again lifted a block on a Trump administration reduction-in-force plan, specifically for the Department of Education.
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While those layoffs had been permitted prior to the shutdown, the lawsuit before Illston deals with Trump administration plans to cut jobs during it — when a significant number of workers are furloughed until Congress passes a spending package to reopen the government. The administration has warned it would pursue permanent layoffs during the shutdown, prompting government unions to file the lawsuit.
As both Republicans and Democrats in Congress dig in, the government shutdown does not appear to have an end in sight, nearly three weeks after funding expired.
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